Tag Archive for howto

In most cases you will need root permission to be able to capture packets on an interface. Using tcpdump (with root) to capture the packets and saving them to a file to analyze with Wireshark (using a regular account) is recommended over using Wireshark with a root account to capture packets on an «untrusted» interface. See the Wireshark security advisories for reasons why.

Days ago I had to investigate a SSL issue in one of my customer’s servers, he installed a SSL certificate but the Nginx SSL configuration was not hardened at all, so he was getting a very poor grade while checking his site at SSL Server Test.

In the same case, if you have a grade lower than A, you should try to optimize your Nginx SSL configuration. Here are some tips to harden your Nginx SSL Configuration.Read more

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to test your upload/download speed from your VPS and share the “famous” picture from speedtest.net ?

Speedtest.net uses Flash to test upload/download speed which is a hassle on most VPS.
The long way to get this is to install VNC and run it from a browser, but that is no longer necessary.
We can now use Matt Martz python script speedtest-cli to accomplish this from the commandline.

Most linux distributions use some type of mechanism to gracefully stop daemons and unmount storage volumes during a reboot or shutdown. It’s most commonly done via scripts that will wait for each daemon to shut down gracefully before proceeding to the next daemon.

As we know, sometimes servers misbehave due to things put them through, and you can quickly end up in a situation where things are going badly. I’m talking about the type of situation where you’re connected via SSH to a server that controls phone lines for five million people and it sits in a tiny building 400 miles away from the nearest human being. We’re talking bad. If you issue a plain reboot command, it might not even make it that far. Once SSH stops running, you’re going to be out of luck.Read more

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. This is guide, howto install or upgrade MySQL Community Server latest and greatest version 5.5.16 on Fedora 15, (14 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8), CentOS 5.6 and Red Hat (RHEL) 5.6/6.Note: If you are upgrading MySQL (from earlier version), then make sure that you backup (dump and copy) your database and configs. And remember run mysql_upgrade command.Read more

Installation
The required packages are different depending on if the system is a client or a server. In this Howto, the server is the host that has the files you want to share and the client is the host that will be mounting the NFS share.

NFSv4 client

apt-get install nfs-common

NFSv4 server

apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

After you finish installing nfs-kernel-server, you might see failure to start nfs-kernel-server due to missing entries in /etc/exports. Remember to restart the service when you finish configuring.Read more